The Ones Who Survived
by Dolorose-Lalonde
Summary: The 413th annual Hunger Games are underway, and victors are in no way exempt from hearing the whispers of rebellion sweeping through Panem. Ancestor-centric.
1. Chapter 1

There was no way to escape the Games. It was like an axe looming all of their necks, or a snarling beast led around on a flimsy rope. Ready to snap, and devour Panem's children in a heartbeat. Even when the Games weren't going on, there were still constant reminders of the annual festival of carnage. There were Victory Tours, constant reruns of past Games. Even more fresh and painful was the sight of a family without their daughter or son.

District Three in particular had a steady amount of tributes that left every year and never came back. At the moment, there were only two victors alive, both in their thirties. One was Damara Megido, a small and sullen woman who had won with an amount of force and intimidation uncharacteristic to her District. Mituna Captor was the other. He set land mines and intricate traps for the other tributes, convincing a Career that he was useful and then coaxing them into running onto a landmine-rigged field at the last minute.

The Victor's Village was lonely, with only the two of them to occupy some of the only grand-looking houses in the entire District. District Three was no Eleven or Twelve, but it was still struck by abject poverty. Most of the inhabitants sported ashen skin and dark crescent-moon bruises under their eyes.

It was no place to live. But then again, not a lot of Panem's districts were much better.

The annual Hunger Games was about to begin, again. And the victors would have no choice but to participate, but thankfully only as spectators this time. Damara is standing at her kitchen counter, her back pressing against the linoleum as she yanked her near-unmanageable hair into a bun. The sky over their District is a grayish-black with only the most vague hint of blue, as always. This will be the twenty-fourth year that she's been a mentor. The carnage was long since routine to her, now.

She hears a rapping knock on wood, and turns to see her front door open. Mituna's standing there, looking as rumpled and haggard as ever. (His hair was a mess and his shirt was backwards and not even buttoned. Their stylist Jasmine had long since given up on making him look presentable.) Damara's known the man since childhood, when being three years his senior had actually mattered. In his youth, he'd been clever beyond his years, as perfectly demonstrated by his performance during his Games. Nowadays, he was a little more…scatterbrained. Something about the Hunger Games had hurt him in some deep, primal way. The way it had for all of the victors. And he handled this by drowning in his own mind.

Mituna blinks, greets Damara in that muddled, incoherent way that only a select few could really understand. Damara ignores how the empty, confused look in his eyes made something near her lungs twist painfully. "The Reaping is today.", she says matter-of-factly, and he nods just as flatly.

They're going to come once again; camera crews and stylists ready to take their new lambs to the slaughter. The two victors would have to try their best to train the new tributes, knowing that they'll almost certainly die. They'd have to watch it, too. They'd come home eventually and have to see their grieving families on the streets.

She's not sure what to feel, anymore.

In a rare show of lucidity, Mituna smiles and Damara can see a familiar spark of sarcasm reach his eyes. "It'll be fine. Everyone knows the odds are ever in _our_ favor."

**A/N: I'm sorry, I just can't get the entire concept of Hungerstuck out of my head.**


	2. Chapter 2

She seldom makes public appearances, anymore. It's too risky; makes her seem too human. And as she looks at the golden, gilded mirror and sees a monster of a woman that carried the scent of death like a crown, she herself finds it hard to believe that she's human.

Empress Peixes, to her groveling sycophants. Her Imperious Condescension, to those who whispered blasphemies about her behind her back.

She takes a tube, golden-bright like everything else in her mansion, and smears an unnatural shade of magenta on her lips. She smiles serenely at the beast in her reflection. It was that time of year again. The Hunger Games: a celebration, _indeed_.

(It was not just mindless cruelty. It was a reminder. The residents of Panem were mortal, finite. She was _not_.)

Empress Peixes, first name unknown to anyone alive. She was not just the Capitol's figurehead, she was their god. A calm, merciless deity that used her subject's children as sacrificial lambs, the Arena being the holy alter-

Peixes pauses as she hears a shatter-crackle of glass.

Speaking of _children_.

Her daughter was probably sulking in her room again, like she often tended to do around this time of year. Her pink lip curls in primal, instinctual revulsion: this was not the heiress she had wanted. Feferi Peixes was too gentle, too sweet to inherit this precarious position; a position in which she was so _very_ sure that half the country wanted her dead. Feferi was a smiling, sprite-like girl that was far too saccharine to be something that Peixes could have possibly pushed out of her body. Now nearing thirteen, the girl had spent her childhood actually trying to befriend the Avoxes that tended to her every need.

(At least, until her dear mother had one hanged in front of her window.)

Under Feferi's bizarre sweetness, the Empress saw a flickering rebel's-flame that frightened her down to her very bones. So for now, she had reruns of the past Games broadcasting 24/7 on screens placed throughout their mansion, accompanied by videotaped procedures of Avoxes-to-be having their tongues surgically removed. Showing her heiress what will happen to her, if she insisted on keeping this up. The crash of glass was probably her throwing something priceless against the screen in her bedroom. She will have to get that replaced, but now. The camera crew is here, to record Peixes in her office, personally wishing what remained of the world a happy Hunger Games.

Empress Peixes, the closest thing to a god their broken earth will ever have.


	3. Chapter 3

Reapings were different, in District Two. Seen by most as the Capitol's lapdog, the children of the Masonry district were not reaped. They _volunteered_. Not a death sentence, an _honor_. Instead of the grim resigning most of the districts wore like a cloak, they treated it like the celebration the Capitol advertised it to be.

The two eldest victors of Two look on, as the tulle-clad Capitol escort fed them al lines that the entirety of Panem knew by heart at this point. Aranea Serket and Horuss Zahhak, both well into their forties. As children, they were not the brash, swaggering mini-soldiers that usually volunteered. They were both the awkward, scholarly types: puzzle pieces that didn't fit with the kids raised from birth to be brutal. So why had they volunteered? Boredom, a plea for honor, or for recognition? It didn't matter, they didn't know anymore. The children they used to be were long gone, replaced by two portraits of the ideal victor.

Aranea, a great and terrible beauty even in her increasing age. She gazes upon the Capitol woman with a look of half-smugness, half-indifference that she's perfected over the years. Horuss, a hulking pillar of strength, staring sullenly at the crowd with the dark, hooded blue eyes of an executioner.

A boy who couldn't have been older than fourteen, raises his hand and bellows, "I volunteer!" Other boys look upon him with seething envy, and Horuss hears his companion chuckle beside him, throaty and low. Nothing like the tiny, bespectacled little girl he remembered. He swallows thickly as the boy in question saunters to the stage; he has a feeling that he will only be coming back by way of coffin. No matter, though. Attention quickly shifts to the girl's side of the public square, the buzzing voices a little shriller in pitch but just as excited.

He turns towards Aranea, who had drawn in a quick-and-sharp lightning bolt of a breath. He could practically see the pride swelling in her chest, and maybe also a little pinprick of fear. "Don't you have a daughter, Serket?", he asks.

She grins.

**A/N: Okay, short one, I know, but the next one will be longer. I promise!**


	4. Chapter 4

The woman in green gazes on the new tributes with nothing less than her utmost sympathy. They're on the train; fidgeting, thin fingers drumming restlessly on the dining table. Eyes drifting out the window, they've never gone outside their district before. They have said maybe three words between the two of them since the Reaping. Their jewel-cheeked escort had sniffed and remarked on their rudeness.

Porrim knows it isn't rudeness. It's the cold shock, probably still resting in the pit of their stomachs. It's the bizarre, enticing luxury of the food laid out before them. It's their certain, impending death: knowing like a prophecy that they'll never go home again.

Twenty-five years. She has been doing this for twenty-five years, now. Porrim Maryam, a victor at seventeen. With her beauty and wit, she had earned sponsors, trading her charm for their life-saving graces. And now she was forty-two, a willowy, coffee-skinned woman who swathed herself in tunics of jade green to match her eyes. They were presents, from the ones who paid a good deal of their personal fortunes just to spend a night with the Rose of Panem, the "Dolorosa".

She didn't want this. After her Games had ended and she was crowned victor, Porrim had mistakenly thought that the nightmare was over. Thrown into a lavish house in the Victor's Village, left there to grieve in peace.

She'd forgotten about how, as the only able-bodied victor of District Eight, she would have to mentor tributes for generations to come. She didn't know the cost of being desirable.

She couldn't have predicted that because of her, her own little brother had been killed as a warning to her, because at first she'd rebelliously denied being sold to rich, lusty Capitol residents like the dirty, desperate girls who offered their bodies to the Head Peacekeeper for a bite of food. Her pride had cost the life of the only family member she had left, with her parents long since eaten up with disease. After that, they'd used the boy to threaten her. Kankri, a Twelve victor twenty years younger than her, someone she'd gotten attached to despite her best judgment. The way she got attached to her tributes every year right before they were lead to definite slaughter. He reminded Porrim of her dead brother, and the Empress knew that. Even nearing middle age, she let herself be loved by those who had the money to afford her. Because she wanted to shield that young man, at least, from the worst of what the Capitol had to offer, the infinite wrath that extended to everyone not within its borders. Victors were discreetly disposed of all the time. Winning the Games did not grant you immunity. If anything, it was even crueler a sentence than death in the Arena. That, at least, was quicker, where as a victor you had the time to turn to morphine, to drink, to the harsh whispers of "_whore_" under lush silk covers. That sort of death was slow, painfully slow, and if she had the chance to take a knife to these children's hearts and save them all the trouble…oh, she _would_.

The girl tribute reaches forward and waves a hand in front of her face, snapping her melancholy reverie in two. Porrim searches her memory for the child's name, and comes up with Rose. Soft, downy blonde hair, beautiful cheekbones, clever eyes that looked like lilacs in the sun. So pretty. _Too_ pretty. If by some miracle this girl wins, there will be another Rose of Panem. The very thought made her shudder down to her bones.

"Did you hear what I said?" The girl has a melodious voice, only slightly shaky with fear. She will have sponsors, this she knew with an almost divine absolution. "What is it like, to be a mentor? I want to know, just in case I win by some chance."

Porrim folds her hands in her lap, hides the growing urge to soothe, to protect. What good did petty words of reassurance do, when she knew these kids were marching towards certain agony?

She smiles kindly at Rose, and also at the boy whose gaze flickered anxiously from the window to the syrup-drenched pastry before him. She couldn't tell which would be a larger mercy: whether they knew what they were truly up against or not. "It really would be best if you didn't."

**A/N: Ugh, I'm sorry about those last two chapters. Again, I really should refrain from writing things at 2 in the morning, in which I completely forget the concept of spellcheck.**

**The Dolorosa's situation is based off of (spoilers?) what Finnick went through, in the books.**


End file.
